Outlook Express Formatting

Q: I use Outlook Express for most of my e-mailing and sometimes I would like to do some formatting (headers, line spacing, etc.) in my e-mails, but I can never figure out how to do it. Please help!

A:I sure can! That really is an excellent question and I’m sure you’re not the only one who has wondered about it. It must be very frustrating when you go to type out an e-mail and all you want to do is add an indent, but you can’t figure out how to do it. And that’s just one example! I can’t even imagine all the other things you could have done with your e-mails if you only knew where to look. Well, I for one, do not want you all to go another second without knowing how to format your e-mails. If you’re using Outlook Express, the process is super easy and I’m sure all of you will get the hang of it right away. Alright, let’s get down to it!

The first thing you need to do is start a new e-mail, so in Outlook Express, click on Create Mail and then place your mouse cursor in the e-mail body with just one click. It’s important to click into the e-mail first, because that activates all of the formatting options for you. When you’re ready to start, go up to the Format menu and choose what you would like to do. A few of the options you’ll see are Style, Font, Paragraph, Background, Encoding and so on. I recommend that you take some time to go over all the choices and familiarize yourself with them. If you do that, you will know better where to go to get done what you want to do.

For example, the Style option is where you’ll find most of your choices. From within the Style menu, you can do everything from change your font to adding a double space to your lines to adding headers to starting a new paragraph to adding bullets and numbers and so on. If you want to add double spacing to your e-mail, go to Format, Style and choose Formatted. You can then begin typing out your e-mail and each line will come with a double space in between. Or, if you’d like to add a bulleted list to your e-mail, go to Format, Style and click on the Bulleted List choice. That will automatically add some bullets to your e-mail and you can then start typing.

Alright, now let’s say you want to change the Font of your e-mail. If so, go to Format, Font and the Font dialogue box will pop up. From there, you can change the font design, the style, the text size and you can even choose a color to type in if you’d like. When you’re done making your selections, just click OK and all of that formatting will then cross over into your e-mail. Once you start typing, you will see all of your changes come alive!

Also from the Format menu, you can add a background to your e-mails. Go to Format, Background and then select either Picture, Color or Sound. If you want to add one of your pictures to the background of your e-mail, choose Picture. You can then browse through your picture files and add one to the e-mail you’re going to send out. Or, you can choose Color and change the whole color scheme of your e-mail. Maybe you’re sending out invitations to a football party you’re having and you’d like to use the team colors of your favorite team. If it were me, I would want to do scarlet and gray for the Ohio State Buckeyes (Go Bucks!), so I would choose an all gray background and then use the Font method from up above to make my text red. It looks so cool 8like that!

The Format menu is also where you can change your text from Plain Text to Rich Text (HTML) or vice versa. Or, if you’d like to add some stationery to your e-mail, you can do that from here as well. Just go to Format, Stationery and then choose the one you’d like to use. It’s as simple as that! So, as you can see, the Format menu gives you the power to do just about anything with the e-mails you send out. If you want to spice your e-mails up a bit, the Format menu is the place to go. Or, if you just want to do some simple formatting, it’s there for you. Whatever you need to do, the Format menu is there for your rescue!

Now, unfortunately, I have not been able to find a way where you can keep the same formatting for every e-mail you send out, so you will have to redo everything for each new e-mail you send. I know that’s a bit of a pain, but it’s really not that bad, because you’ll probably want to do something different for each one anyway. Either way, the Format menu is a great tool to familiarize yourself with in Outlook Express. It holds the power to make your e-mails look just the way you want them. Check it out today!